Personal blog of smallpancakes.
Three big things of 2025: Layoffs, First client, Getting Married And the challenge of 2025 was money anxiety. Layoffs Before the layoffs, I used to mark my year with my next travel destination. Traveling has always been really stressful . The hardest one was the first trip I had to fly alone to JFK and then land in Florida. I still remember trying to find a place to stay for the overnight layover.…
It felt like fate as after I posted on status.cafe, I saw Petra’s status : Indie Web Contest voting is now open !!!!!!!!!! -> https://petrapixel.neocities.org/contest Highly recommend you go check out the contest if you’re reading this! I didn’t think much and clicked on the link. And wow, nostalgia kicked in right away. Going through the list has been super inspiring, and I added quite a few…
I’m not good with spicy food, but I can eat everything at Thai Town (瓦城) today, which is outstanding! Overall, will I visit again? YES, and I’ve already eaten many times, it’s just today I suddenly felt motivated to write this down. Rice I like how the Thai rice is longer, not as sticky and more chewy. And since the price is per person with unlimited servings, that’s why I prefer not to order any…
Including me, more and more people are willing to pay for content when there are free alternatives available. Let’s take learning Japanese as an example. Let's first ignore paying for 1:1 or small group lessons, as time is the most valuable asset. I’m referring to content that can reach a broader audience, like online courses, large webinars, paid communities, apps, newsletters and such. There are…
I’ve been mentoring at coding bootcamps and courses for around 10 years. First, I’m talking about bootcamps: fast-paced, expensive (> 10,000 USD), and hyper-focused on a career overhaul. My observation reveals an ugly truth: AI is better than most bootcamp grads, and it may take some years to catch up. Note that I’m using “is” and not “will be.” So why hire them? Plus, with layoffs happening at a…
Dried Mangoes In terms of pricing, each brand did not vary that much. As 7D is the most famous brand, we mainly got those. 200g is around 260 PHP and 100g is around 132 PHP. Here’s my personal ranking: Cebu 88 - Smells and tastes the most like real mangoes, but the hardest of all to bite. We’re still young, so this is fine. 7D - Chunks are in smaller, manageable pieces Cebu - Tastes a lot like 7D,…
I’m writing on the plane! Loved that I had set up the workflow so I can write/sync/publish from all my devices. I always try to learn a couple of words when visiting a foreign country. And I usually do that on the plane since I can’t do much without the internet. I’m listening to the podcast Go Filipino . A common way locals greet people is to ask where they’re coming from, going to. You don’t…
If anyone knows me IRL, I’m not a person that steps outside the door alone unless I have a very good reason. Those cases involve: eating because I’m starving to the point my head hurts going to the bank because the thing that I need can’t be done online going to the hospital/clinic because I needed to Listing a few to share it’s those types of scenarios. Stepping outside already brings some mental…
It’s already February! Well, technically, since I also celebrate the Lunar New Year, it hasn’t been that far from the New Year. Last year felt a lot more chaotic because I was easily affected by things I couldn’t control. I wanted to sit down and write this post today to better inform myself about what I already have under control, what I have been disillusioned with not having control of, and…
Building this site has been more than just coding. It's been about recollecting my memories of the old web. I miss the personalities of each website, the guestbooks we used to sign, and, most of all, the openness to share. To put it simply, it was a hobby for most personal website builders. Unlike now, where creators are expected to go on a monetization journey. I will share the three things that…
⊹⋆。⋆The Trigger ⋆。⋆⊹ Around the end of last year, I got a remade gen 1 version from my brother. And then I remembered that I used to have one and went dug into my drawer and found my old Music Star v6 Tamagotchi. The most important thing is to have someone play together, so I asked my partner whether he wanted to play together and he said YES! Starting Tamagotchi Tamablrs After playing for a bit,…
✧･ﾟ Hello, World! ･ﾟ ✧ Hi! We are smallpancakes 🥞 Recently, we've been missing the old web so we decided to build this site. The fun part of building a website is building the website. And now comes the challenging part, the blog! To be honest, we've started a lot of blogs and then abandoned them within a couple of months, or even after the first post has been published. One of the reasons was…